analytic philosophy

09/11/2017

One of the the peculiarities of the analytic tradition is that if you say, "I am interested in translation in analytic philosophy," people are more likely to talk about Quine (or Davidson) rather than about the peculiar fact that many of the works of early analytic philosophy are the product of translation. As Glock suggests,* with an amusing anecdote about Quine, the Polish logicians became known, first, in German. Leaving aside those writing in English, those that were not translated into German were often forgotten unless they were later translated into English.

But, of course, now that English is The Frankish (lingua franca) of analytic philosophy (and scientific culture more generally) some of our classic texts are primarily known in translation. I was surprised to learn recently, for example, not only that anybody (Hacker & Schulte) tried to improve on the Anscombe's influential translation (of the Investigations), but that, in fact, it had been turned into a fourth edition. I had missed the intervening editions. One wonders if this (4th ed) is a nice case of truth in advertising -- a revised translation changes the book substantially and so should count as a new edition -- or better understood as a marketing gimmick (given that Wittgenstein's text presumably has been left alone; the book is not advertised as a 'critical edition,' after all). Because I don't co-inhabit space with Wittgenstein scholars these days, I am unsure to what degree debates over Ogden/Ramsey vs Pears/McGuinness (still) exist (see here for useful site).

I am, in fact, unsure who generated the best known sentence in the history of analytic philosophy, the Swiftian sounding "The Nothing Noths." I leave aside here the tricky question to what degree the sentence is merely mentioned or used and abused by analytic philosophy. I had always assumed that "The Nothing Noths" was produced by Arthur Pap in his translation of Carnap's treatment of Heidegger,Das Nichts nichtet. Pap (ultimately a student of Ernest Nagel), whose influence on the shaping of analytic philosophy's self-image tends to get ignored, did a bad job on the title -- there is a real distinction between overcoming metaphysics (a straightforward and philosophically resonant translation of Carnap's title) and eliminating it, which gives analytic philosophy a more militarist sensibility [even if somebody may argue that the difference is merely symbolic (one ought to take symbols seriously)]. But, in fact, unless I am missing something, Pap's translation does not contain "The Nothing Noths," but rather the far more ugly "The Nothing Nothings." The earliest source I can find (on Google, that is) is Peter Achinstein's (1985)) The Nature of Explanation (where Heidegger is mentioned, but Carnap not!); but (with all due respect to Achinstein who was quite influential in those days), I suspect it was given wide currency by David Lewis in 1988, and then finds its way into the literature on Carnap and Heidegger! (But maybe Ayer is the source).

Despite The Nothing Noths, in general Carnap was not blessed in his translators. I don't think George's Logical Structure of the World really conveys the meaning of Der Logische Aufbau der Welt. (When I first heard the title of the book in English, I thought it was a book in the philosophy of physics.) The Logical Construction of the World would have better conveyed both the agency and progressivity involved (not to mention the resonances with Kantianism).

To the best of my knowledge, little attention is paid to the quality of translations of early analytic philosophy (for my own earlier musings on translation more generally recall here, here, here, and here). The relevant comparison class is the focus on, and heated controversies over, the translations of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Descartes, and perhaps Spinoza. This is a bit surprising if one takes Quine's once influential ideas about translation (and holism) seriously. But not so surprising not just because 'we're all realists now,' but also (i) because we really don't introduce our students into analytic philosophy by way of study of our canonical texts--we are a progressive enterprise and our students deserve to be introduced to the topic by way of contemporary works on the cutting edge (or text-books). (This was less true when there was still an active cult of Wittgenstein.) I think that's pretty much the whole truth. But there is also an ironic fact, that when we do assign the early analytics to undergrads, the English versions have become canonical, no?***

09/05/2017

1. People like me, who have been trying to do philosophy for more than forty years, do in due course learn, if they’re lucky, how to do what they’ve been trying to do: that is, they do learn how to do philosophy. But although I’ve learned how to do philosophy, nobody ever told me how do it, and, so far as I would guess, nobody will have told you how to do it, or is likely to tell you how to do it in the future. The most charitable explanation of that fact, the fact, that is, that nobody tells philosophy students how to do philosophy, is that it is impossible to explain to anybody how philosophy is to be done. The only way to teach people how to do it is by letting them watch, and listen, and imitate. The least charitable explanation of the self-same fact, the fact that we don’t teach you how to do philosophy, is that those of us who have learned how to do it struggled so hard to get where we now are that we’re now selfishly reluctant to give you some of the fruit of our struggle for free: we think you, too, should suffer. Probably there’s some truth in each explanation.--G.A. Cohen "How to Do Political Philosophy" 225. [Edited by Mike Otsuka]

I am unsure if Cohen would have wished for these remarks to appear in print, but I am pleased Mike Otsuka included them in his edition. There is much in this short essay to ruminate on, and I hope to return to it again before long.

Once upon a time, Cohen teaches, professional (analytic) philosophers* were not trained in method. These days there are handbooks to philosophical method (edited by leading philosophers), even one on the methods (note the plural) in analytical political theory (which I am toying with buying). So, it may become hard to imagine to some readers what analytic philosophy was like in the days when its methods were not articulated yet. The previous sentence is deliberately equivocal between the scandalous thought that in earlier times [A] analytic philosophy was free of methods and the equally scandalous thought (the one G.A. Cohen entertains and considers plausibly true) that [B] the methods were kept quiet. Cohen adds to B the further rationalization/explanation [B*] that people may have thought -- perhaps because they repeatedly read the Meno or Protagoras -- the methods of philosophy cannot be explicitly taught/said, but have to be shown via example/exemplars.

Before I say more about [A-B-B*] and [C] the more sadistic-survivor-syndrom interpretation [recall "those of us who have learned how to do it struggled so hard to get where we now are that...we think you, too, should suffer"] as well as its close cousin [C*] the ungenerous interpretation ["we’re now selfishly reluctant to give you some of the fruit of our struggle for free"], it is worth marking three features of Cohen's position (and again, for all I know he may well have not wished to publish this). First he is surprisingly immodest in his willingness to assert that he is now a proper exemplar who has "learned how to do philosophy." (I am not suggesting he is wrong.) Second, in the paper, he associates philosophy primarily with arguments. Much of his initial, primary advice is about how to think of one's arguments and what to aim for in them. In fact, these two features of Cohen are connected, in a sense, because what Cohen wishes to promote, it seems, is an understanding of philosophy as a kind of hyper-self-consciousness about the nature, aims, targets, and status of one's argument. (That is, the connection is not one of entailment; but Cohen seems to suggest that because he is in control of argument he can have a proper estimation of his own status.)**

And, third, it is a bit odd that if Cohen thinks philosophical method is about argument that (a) it was not taught and (b) that it would be all that difficult to teach. (That's compatible with few getting good at it.) I actually think this shows that the focus on argument is a bit of a red herring. For, Cohen also allows that

Sometimes one senses that a consideration has some sort of bearing on a controversy...and it is nevertheless worthwhile bringing the consideration forward, if only because it may provoke a discussion that leads to a clearer idea of the polemical significance of the consideration, that is, into which box(es) in our matrix it falls. One should aspire to clarity, but one should not avoid possible insight for the sake of avoiding unclarity. A bad way never to make a mistake is to shut up and say nothing. (226)

I am not suggesting Cohen is defending here the worth of argument-free insight, but he does seem to think that acquiring a certain amount of clarity and insight may be worth the price of argumentative muddle. I think Cohen is, in fact, rather skeptical about what arguments can achieve because he is extremely aware that what grounds (forgive the property metaphors) the occupation of philosophical territory is the commitment to a "point of view" (232) as "obvious." (It's not that arguments for these point of views don't exist; they do exist and can be refined and clarified greatly.) In this essay, Cohen does not say much more, I think, about how one comes to find oneself to occupy a philosophical territory, so we'll leave it at that. (One senses it's not so much Carnapian voluntarism as it is to be explained, if there is one, in an emotional commitment to certain values as non-relinquish-able.)

I do want to close with two alternative suggestions. I think the most charitable explanation of that fact that the methods of philosophy were not taught is that, to restate, [A] analytic philosophy was free of methods. (This is different from the claim that [D] the methods of (early to middle) analytical philosophy were not unified.) Now, I am aware that, at various point early analytic philosophers certainly discussed the methods of sciences; they also often claimed to be following a "method of analysis" or a methodized "logical analysis" or a "method of rational reconstruction."++ And their writings are full of proposals (for others) to follow some method or another, but it's by no means obvious that there was a method. (There are, rather, lots of attempts at articulating some method or another; recall my exchange with Dennett and his response on analysis;and also this post on the Strawson-Carnap exchange) .) To say that there was no method is not a criticism.

But it does lead me to the most uncharitable explanation of the silence over method: (recall) [E] it is a form of boundary policing. Under such a regime, outsiders are permanently mystified about the rules of the game because they don't know what move to make to acquire standing. [To put this in terms of a bad joke: insiders have Wittgenstein to explain the game to them; outsiders get bullied.] Obviously, the least charitable explanation need not be true. But there are plenty of incentives that are compatible with the truth.

If the least charitable explanation has some truth then it's a good thing that philosophy is being methodized. Of course, it need not follow that following philosophical method teaches you how to do philosophy.

08/21/2017

[T]he logical empiricists can be interpreted as engaged in a project of voluntarist racial eliminativism. They did not take themselves to have an in principle argument against racial categorisation of human beings. Their frequent references to biological racial categorisation make it clear that they thought this was something you could coherently do, and it would be inconsistent with their version of conventionalism to argue that one is cognitively mistaken to use an empirically meaningful categorisation scheme. Hence, while the position I am attributing to them is similar to the position that racial taxonomic terms are simply meaningless, it is not quite that – it is not that they thought there was no empirically meaningful way that one could make sense of human racial taxonomy. Rather, it was that they thought one ought not use these terms....As such they adopted a policy of refusing to endorse any instances of racial categories being used as part of empirical explanations, and discouraging racial explanation by rhetorical means.--Liam Kofi Bright (2017) "Logical empiricists on race" Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences

Liam Kofi Bright reminded me of his paper in response to my post on the method of composite portraiture (which traces back to Galton). [I leave aside here to what degree Bright's paper fits that method.] In his paper he diagnoses a taboo within logical empiricism against (biological) racial explanations of social affairs. The taboo is maintained by an act of self-legislation in the adoption of certain conceptual frameworks (and methods) and a rhetorical-polemical attitude against those that used alternative conceptual frameworks (that included racial explanations). What makes taboos interesting is that, in order to be effective, they require self-command and group discipline/loyalty, that is, esprit des corps. This is possible when a group is reasonably small, shares an important aim, and has a way of controlling entry. Bright does not address the maintenance of the taboo, but in the sentences I skipped, Bright suggests that it is their (i.e., the logical empiricists') shared "political projects" and moral commitments, which are 'external' or 'optative' to the adopted framework that sustains the taboo (a word he does not use), undoubtedly facilitated by informal communication (when they were in the same place) and small numbers. Because Bright reads the logical empiricists in a Kantianizing fashion (with relativized a priori), we may remind ourselves that they are not the first to legislate a taboo within philosophy: in Kant's Die Metaphysik der Sitten, Kant (recall) limits -- as (ahh) Slavoj Žižek point out -- the possible philosophical role of history (as a form of inquiry) into the origin of a legitimate authority on practical grounds.

In his essay, Bright explicitly recognizes that the taboo (racial explanation) is maintained not because using it is meaningless. That is to say, the logical empiricists have not shown that using racial explanation is false. One need not be Freud to recognize one does not need taboos on the evidently false. But it also does not follow that the logical empiricists thought the taboo was hiding the truth. (If anything, using a taboo to hide the truth is self-defeating because one will generate contradictions, internal tensions, etc.) Rather, it's clear that they thought that regardless of the scientific status of racial explanation, there is always a non-trivial risk these get mingled with immoral/inhumane political aims. That is, the members of the Vienna Circle are (recall) engaged in responsible speech because they recognize what we call the inductive risks of legitimizing racial explanations. The polemic with Heidegger centers, in part, on their recognition that his way of philosophizing has noxious consequences (recall Glymour). Taboos can be efficient in preventing the predictable downstream costs and energy of combating the pernicious effects of the damage done by racial explanation (in the service of racial hierarchy, social exclusion, eugenic programs, etc.).

Bright is clear that the logical empiricists engaged in polemical rhetoric against those that violated their taboo. This is significant for two reasons: first, they attempted to impose their internal compact on others (who had not contracted into their program). That is, there is something imperialist to demand from others that they abide by your self-imposed taboo. Second, we can discern here strategies that became all too familiar in their students and heirs in later generations of analytical philosophy; an excessive willingness to use rhetorical means in combating opposing schools.

Given the political moment -- with racial subordination and elimination a live possibility -- it is easy to forgive the logical empiricists willingness to aim to impose their taboo with rhetorical means on others. They were were part of a struggle in which the racialist explanation loving sides were quite willing to support racial hierarchy, and worse. But most of the subsequent academic struggles their students engaged in are not like this; being wrong about when to discusses semantic composition or modal metaphysics does not lead to racial elimination.*

As an extensive aside, Bright recognizes a problematic exception to his argument: Neurath's translation (in 1910 with his first wife Anna Schapire-Neurath) of Galton's work on eugenics, Hereditary genius.** (Speaking of taboos, Neurath's translation goes unmentioned in the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Neurath!) Now, Bright could have said that in 1910 logical empiricism did not exist yet and that circumstances between 1910 and, say, the 1930s were different (the founding of the Vienna Circle can be dated to 1928 or so). This would also explain Neurath's apparent change of heart later. This is not Bright's strategy (perhaps because he also quotes from the relatively early (1921) Anti-Spengler.) With a nod to Thomas Uebel's contextual analysis and, more important, the writings of W.E. Du Bois, Bright remarks that a defense of racial breeding need not be a defense of white supremacy. And, undoubtedly, there is logical space between the can wish to breed for all kinds of characteristic without wishing for a racialized polity. And, in fact, in 1910 eugenics was part of a progressive, scientific gospel that influenced all kinds of policies and scientific projects not all of them pertaining to race (see Tim Leonard's book).

Even so, it is worth noting that by 1910, Galton's Heriditary Genius, was an old book (first published in 1869); it draws on Darwin's ideas, but by 1910 was certainly not cutting edge in its science. It has, in fact, a chapter, "The Comparative Worth of Different Races" which is as bad as it sounds.*** Galton, who was the leading statistician of his age, concludes "that the average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own [Anglo-Saxon]." (In the hierarchy, the negro is still a grade above the "Australian type.") A satirist may note that Galton is, in fact, willing to acknowledge that there were better races than his own, for he remarks that "the average ability of the [long vanished!] Athenian race is, on the lowest possible estimate, very nearly two grades higher than our own." But Galton takes this to be an argument for racial purity because the Athenians allowed too much interbreeding!+ So, Galton's Heriditary Genius clearly embraces the existence of racial hierarchies (and these are not incidentally connected to British empire). But, interestingly enough (and I suspect this may have had some appeal to young Neurath), unlike many German eugenic tracts, Heriditary Genius is not antisemitic. While the Jews are not formerly classified in the racial hierarchy (due to lack of statistical evidence), most of the references to Jews in it are favorable.

Let me return to Bright's article. He establishes the existence of a philosophical taboo in (what I'll call) a highly polarized political context. Bright does not take a stance on the strategy he describes. But I am inclined to think that sometimes such taboos are necessary and useful and that the logical empiricists are in this, and in so many other ways, worth emulating. The opposing camps were part of a larger Kulturkampf where there was a genuine risk that bullets (and worse) would settle the true about racial hierarchy [to be precise: bullets can't settle the truth]. In the context of such high degree of polarization, the voluntary enforcement of taboos can serve a valuable function. They save and harness intellectual resources, they prevent unnecessary mingling of meaningful ideas with awful political and ethical policies, and they prevent the ambitious young from being tempted down unwise and immoral paths.

Of course, the rhetorical and professional enforcement of a taboo comes with a two-fold cost. First, as we have seen, the very success of the strategy may encourage imitation of certain, imperialist behaviors (involving less dangerous topics) in less existentially polarized contexts. Second, the existence of a taboo is also a temptation for the unscrupulous and ambitious young who find themselves born in later times. They may well think that there are low-hanging fruits which will advance the cause of knowledge (and their career). Sometimes these unwise are lucky and they live in quiet times and their greedy, rashness has no downside.

The contemporary methods of the history of philosophy are fine-tuned to study texts and arguments. While there are attempts to bring the techniques of the study of material cultures and, even archeology, to bear on it (see J.H. Smith), on the whole these methods are designed to focus on describing, interpreting, and tracing (the influence of) the views of authors, ideas, concepts, and arguments. These methods all treat the sources as evidence, and the scholar as a kind of detective (see Goldenbaum) piecing the material together for some end (historical truth, argumentative progress, conceptual articulation, historical meaning, etc.) [recall this recent post for a partial taxonomy]. It's much more nebulous to try, with the methods of contemporary scholarship, to characterize precisely (the ideas, arguments, views, concepts [etc.] of) a Zeitgeist, a tradition, a collective, and a (dynamic) style.+ In fact, for example, few allow that Zeitgeist is a legitimate concept to be deployed in one's scholarshop. In particular, the question I wish to explore here is how one can begin to characterize a collective way of thinking (arguing, conceptualizing, etc.) when the underlying source materials are composed of individuals who also, as it happens, embrace individuality. What follows is inspired by M.A. Khan's (2004) use of the composite portrait.++

Galton's composite portrait is, in one sense, a counterfactual image available to an especially (non-existent) acute artist if such an artist did not have personality, which biases his or her ways of seeing and representing the world. Galton is hinting, here, at two traditions: one is the Platonizing God (the highest artist) which only cognizes essences or types not particulars; the other is the romantic artist who has heightened powers of sensation. If the best artists lacked personality they would each be able to generate the consensus portrait of a certain type. Because the camera lacks personality, and so is unbiased, Galton believes it can be an instrument for portraying types. I leave aside here all the ways in which the camera may well be biased (because I am not interested in defending Galton's particular procedure).

In his 2004 article, Khan (a mathematical economist and a leading philosopher of economics) appropriates the idea of a composite portrait in order to describe the practice*** of offering a composite photograph constituted by the "giants" of the economics "profession," in order to mirror to the contemporary economist by showing her (that is, the professional contemporary economist), "how she looked not too long ago." Now, we can ignore the bit of flattery toward the contemporary economist, who in her very professionalism is no giant at all (qua professionals we are all worker bees), and say that the point of such a composite (in Khan's hands; see also Kahn 2004b) is to characterize the activities of a group of people who helped constitute (to use Kuhnian language) paradigm and profession-generating norms and practices that the contemporary economist will recognize, in some reflected sense, as her own. Now, Khan is interested in the composite portrait not just because of its entanglement with the sordid history of eugenics, but also because it allows him to make available for discussion the complex ethical issues surrounding the fact that one is a member of a larger community with sordid practices, whose past is not fully acknowledged and (recall) whose shadow lingers and intermingles with present practices and the distribution of status and significance in the present credit economy of a profession. So much (recall) for Khan and his aims.

In what follows, a composite portrait as a method in the history of philosophy is, as I shall use it, designed to bring out (a) characteristic features of a group's philosophizing in order (b) to illuminate characteristic features that may still resonate in today's philosophy, (c) without claiming that any of these features are present among all the members of the group studied (d) nor demanding that all the members of the group are treated equally.

On (a): it is worth recognizing that characteristic features of a group bias one's presentation to what is unusual about that group as compared to the history of philosophy as such. So, for example, if one grants (for the sake of (ahh) argument) that arguments are characteristic of philosophy and, in fact, the group that will be the subject of one's composite picture is also philosophical in this sense, then in a composite portrait of a group one need not bring out, necessarily, that they argue; but rather one portrays what is unusual about the way they argue or the ends that are pursued by their arguments or the epistemic, cultural, and social dynamics or processes in which these arguments are embedded. That is to say, the composite portrait is intended to bring out and emphasize a certain deviance or distinctiveness shared by the group; it is not meant to capture all the characteristics that compose them.

On (b): it is worth noting that generating a composite portrait may seem to come close to a species of Whig history, but its aim is not to glorify the present, but rather to make visible the often effaced traces of how our (perhaps tacit) self-conceptions came about and, thus, available for discussion. So, a composite portrait has as much family resemblance to Whig history as it does to genealogical approaches.

On (c): the composite portrait is not a perfect blend of the underlying members of the group to be followed by a mechanical operation (of the camera). Rather, it has more in common with the artist's choice in discerning what matters about the group. In particular, the selection of what matters is informed by an understanding of contemporary practices in order to bring out resonances that are still salient.

On (d): it is worth acknowledging that this deviates clearly from Galton's underlying idea. Galton wished to capture a generic yet especially salient (once brought to light) qualities that individuals have in common as a type. Philosophical groups tend not to be so egalitarian: so, for example, as ancient doxagraphers practiced, the distinctive features of founders of a school or tradition tend to be accorded more significance than some of their followers or students.

What a-d have in common is a reliance on the judgment and skill of the philosophical-historical portraitist who must both understand the source materials, be capable of deploying (let's say) a historical camera, and have a sense of which portraits may be used as historical mirrors for one's peers. I recognize that the present discussion is all highly abstract and so life-less. It calls for further exemplars of composite photographs (about which more elsewhere), and, perhaps, it inspires some scholars to use their tools to develop the art of scholarly composite portraiture.

07/12/2017

One of the most exciting intellectual moments of my career was my 1948 discovery of Knut Wicksell's unknown and untranslated dissertation, Finanztheoretische Untersuchungen, buried in the dusty stacks of Chicago's old Harper Library. Only the immediate post-dissertation leisure of an academic novice allowed for the browsing that produced my own dramatic example of learning by serendipity. Wicksell's new principle of justice in taxation gave me a tremendous surge of self-confidence. Wicksell, who was an established figure in the history of economic ideas, challenged the orthodoxy of public finance theory along lines that were congenial with my own developing stream of critical consciousness. From that moment in Chicago, I took on the determination to make Wicksell's contribution known to a wider audience, and I commenced immediately a translation effort that took some time and considerable help from Elizabeth Henderson, before final publication.

Stripped to its essentials, Wicksell's message was clear, elementary, and self-evident. Economists should cease proffering policy advice as if they were employed by a benevolent despot, and they should look to the structure within which political decisions are made. Armed with Wicksell, I, too, could dare to challenge the still-dominant orthodoxy in public finance and welfare economics. In a preliminary paper, I called upon my fellow economists to postulate some model of the state, of politics, before proceeding to analyse the effects of alternative policy measures. I urged economists to look at the "constitution of economic polity," to examine the rules, the constraints within which political agents act. Like Wicksell, my purpose was ultimately normative rather than antiseptically scientific. I sought to make economic sense out of the relationship between the individual and the state before proceeding to advance policy nostrums.

Wicksell deserves the designation as the most important precursor of modern public-choice theory because we find, in his 1896 dissertation, all three of the constitutive elements that provide the foundations of this theory: methodological individualism, homo economicus, and politics-as-exchange. I shall discuss these elements of analytical structure in the sections that follow. In Section V, I integrate these elements in a theory of economic policy. This theory is consistent with, builds upon, and systematically extends the traditionally accepted principles of Western liberal societies. The implied approach to institutional-constitutional reform continues, however, to be stubbornly resisted almost a century after Wicksell's seminal efforts. The individual's relation to the state is, of course, the central subject matter of political philosophy. Any effort by economists to shed light on this relationship must be placed within this more comprehensive realm of discourse.---James Buchanan ("1986 Nobel Lecture") The Constitution of Economic Policy

l have quoted the first three paragraphs of Buchanan's Nobel lecture. In what follows I focus on the second paragraph. So, let me just say about the first paragraph that while there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the charming opening vignette nor the significance of Wicksell to the history of public-choice theory, one can also recognize in it Buchanan's rhetorical and political savvy to know that his Swedish audience will be pleased by the praise for their compatriot (himself an important influence on Swedish economics). Buchanan's sometime collaborator, Gordon Tullock (who gets a mention in the lecture), was notably absent from that stage and was not known to exhibit such savvy. One may even say that it is consistent with the best insights of public-choice (and Tullock deserves praise for this [recall]) that opportune expressions of praise are, alas, an ineleminable part of the politics of academic recognition and credit.

In addition, Buchanan signals the importance of leisure and serendipity, which is the loveliest consequence of life's uncertainty. I go beyond the text by suggesting that the conditions that make serendipity possible are leisure, a scarce resource itself rooted in structural features of a political economy, and well-prepared minds--it's not just anybody that wanders around the old Harper library.

Okay, let's turn to the second paragraph. Buchanan is clear that his is a normative project. And while there is plenty to criticize in public choice with the tools of philosophy, what philosophers can learn from his project has not been fully assimilated. For I think his claims here can be decoupled from his commitment to "methodological individualism, homo economicus, and politics-as-exchange." What follows is a bit abstract and, for the sake of brevity, non-polemical (so without some juicy examples). I rewrite the key claims here as follows:

Philosophers should cease proffering policy and normative advice as if they were employed by a benevolent despot,+

When philosophers offer policy and normative guidance we should look to the structure within which political and normative decisions are made.

That is, too much policy-relevant, and ethically salient, philosophy assumes that the conditions under which the uptake of our ideas takes place is irrelevant. This is so despite the very sophisticated traditions of theorizing about the context-sensitivity of assertion (e.g., De Rose). Obviously, the previous sentence is an exaggeration in two senses: first, philosophers are (recall) increasingly willing to apply, reflexively, ideas about inductive risk (Douglas), epistemic injustice (Fricker), and epistemic violence (Dotson) to the norms and institutions of philosophy itself. Second, philosophers have become very interested in non-ideal theorizing as is evidenced by the interest in, say, feasibility constraints (I link to Brennan's work because Brennan himself is influenced by public choice). But non-ideal theory is, as of yet (correct me if I am wrong), not yet context-specific theorizing.

The last sentence of the previous paragraph may generate anxiety about relativism. A lot of my philosophical friends want to make general or invariant claims. While I do not share such anxiety, I think we can tame the anxiety if we follow a version of the third key claim:

Philosophers should explicitly postulate and model the state/politics, before proceeding to propose measures.

That is, we should analyze and make explicit the political and social conditions under which we speak as normative and theoretical authorities and model the possible uptake of our proposals. For, by doing this we do not undermine the validity of our claims; rather we allow these to be progressively adapted, if necessary, to further salient conditions. That is, by engaging in this modeling exercise we became adept at recognizing and making explicit the factors that are salient to our practices. This last can then feedback into a process of mutual criticism and learning and so make our theorizing less fragile to hidden assumptions.

Of course, the proposed modeling exercise is not needed if we only speak to each other, or if we don't care about what our words do.

06/22/2017

In many ways I see Derrida as following Heidegger. But he was more pessimistic than Heidegger about the prospects for good metaphysics. And he paid a kind of attention to language that Heidegger never did. One of the main things that he did was to distinguish between what he called “speech” and what he called “writing”. He meant these terms in a more or less technical way. By “speech” he meant, very roughly, the use of signs whose meanings were intrinsic to them, so that they couldn’t be misinterpreted. By “writing” he meant, again roughly, the use of signs whose meanings were extrinsic to them—that is to say, whose meanings depended on the signs’ association with other signs—so that they could be misinterpreted. And he rejected the idea there was any such thing as “speech”, so understood: there was only “writing”. This was significant, because he also argued that much traditional philosophy, including most traditional metaphysics, tacitly presupposed that there was such a thing as “speech”. This was part of the reason why he was more pessimistic than Heidegger about the prospects for good metaphysics: he was sceptical about how far metaphysics could thrive once it had unshackled itself from the traditional forms that it had taken. And this is all relevant to analytic metaphysicians too, because his arguments about the unacceptability of traditional metaphysics carry over to what they’re doing.

So yes, there is something to be said for analytic metaphysicians reading Derrida and confronting the challenge that he poses to their various enterprises. But his style and approach to philosophy are so different from theirs that it would be silly to pretend that they are liable to find his work anything other than alien. Of course I hope that my book may help in that respect, by casting some of his principal ideas in ways that analytic philosophers will find more familiar and more accessible.--Adrian Moore interviewed @3AM Magazine.[HT Leiterreports]

lt is extremely rare for analytical philosophers to say anything positive about Derrida. (In fact, I kind of enjoyed the scandal it caused me to be doing so [recallhere, here, and here].)* It is even more unusual to claim that Derrida may well be relevant to analytic metaphysicians in particular. So, I have decided to read Moore's book because of the interview (so more about that not before long).

In the passage quoted above, Moore (Oxford) hints at a substantive reason for analytic philosophers to take an interest: that Derrida undermines (shall we say) the ground beneath the projects analytic metaphysicians pursue. Somewhat strikingly, Moore claims that Derrida has arguments. (This is often denied.) As presented, Derrida is a thoroughgoing semantic holist, who, thereby, makes impossible certain (presumably realist/non-idealist) metaphysical projects. Right now such holism is a non-starter. (One can say, not entirely unfairly, that it was only through the rejection of Quine's holism that contemporary metaphysics got off the ground.) But presumably Moore thinks that Derrida's version of holism is especially insightful and challenging. Moore does not say what Derrida's arguments are that can pull the analytical metaphysian back from her project.

In the passage, Moore allows that Derrida's style is "alien" to the contemporary analytical metaphysician. One may think, in fact, that Moore believes that for those trained in analytical idiom, Derrida is simply unintelligible because Derrida's idiom is incommensurable (in the Kuhnian sense, say) with ours. But a moment's reflection reveals that there is something peculiar about Moore's stance here (analogous to Kuhn's ability to discuss incommensurable scientific paradigms); for Moore clearly believes that he can read and understand Derrida. (Let's stipulate he can.) And Moore is, of course, a trained analytic metaphysician (although by no means a kneejerk realist). So, Moore implies, strongly, that despite alien first impression there is no fundamental incommensurability between an analytical philosopher and Derrida's writing. (His comprehension of Derrida is a proof of real possibility.)

As an aside, if there is no fundamental incommensurability between an analytical philosopher and Derrida's writing, then many analytical philosophers (who often claim that Derrida is bullshit) are just intellectually lazy or dishonest in their encounters with Derrida.

Be that as it may, Moore does not claim that Derrida's arguments would successfully undermine the project of the analytic metaphysian. They are said only to "challenge" them. One may wonder what the benefit of such relevance is. Moore could be thinking that such a challenge could lead to more subtle reflections on the (semantic, conceptual) foundations of the metaphysician's enterprise. It would be amusing (in a cunning of history sense) if grappling with Derrida created more stable foundations for analytical metaphysics.

Such a result would be unintended by Derrida because Derrida's skepticism about metaphysics is not just, as it were, epistemological; it has a Socratic and political or ethical element. Moore hints at the Socratic element in a touching passage:

The main point of this passage is a decline and fall theme: the loss of self-consciousness. (I leave aside the rather harsh comment on the contemporary metaphysician's interest.) In fact, one may see Moore as saying that the point of an encounter with Derrida is that it would lead to a recovery of self-consciousness.

In the interview Moore does not explain the nature or point of such self-consciousness. And one may well wonder if it prevents one from getting on with the business of making it then is it really worth the agonizing, opportunity costs?

05/26/2017

David Held and Pietro Maffettone collect essays exploring the global dimensions -- and arguing for the necessarily global character -- of contemporary political theorizing...In addition to the familiar topics of human rights and global distributive justice, it includes contributions on the legitimacy of international law and transnational political institutions; on just war theory; and on a cluster of issues including territoriality, the global economy, and humans' relations to the natural environment and to future generations.

This integrated approach is welcome, and the book as a whole is a valuable resource for readers seeking to acquaint themselves with the state of the art in global political theory. The editors' introduction makes two agenda-setting points. First, they claim, political theory has reached a "cosmopolitan plateau," where acceptance of the equal moral status of all individuals (regardless of birthplace or location) defines the boundaries of reasonable disagreement in normative theorizing. Of course, different authors draw significantly different conclusions from the assumption of equal moral status; many theorists accept it without understanding themselves to be thereby committed to radically revisionist conclusions about global distributive justice or about the entitlements of states to control their own borders.--Emma Saunders-Hastings @NDPR Reviewing David Held and Pietro Maffettone (eds.), Global Political Theory, Polity, 2016.

In his 1992 paper, Pogge contrasts his concrete inspiration with the ways "politicians are speaking of a new world order." In historical context this is a nod to President Bush's first Gulf war to restore the border between Iraq and Kuwait and restore a (protected) sovereignty to Kuwait sanctioned by international law and global institutions. In that context, a new world order referred to American supremacy within the constraints of, and channeled by, international law and institutions. The complex entanglement of contemporary ethics with American hegemony (in the way Mill's or Green's thought was intertwined with imperial power) demands to be better understood and, I would argue, questioned (recall Khan on Singer). Be that as it may, Pogge's willingness to revisit borders is prescient, although as we've learned since, the actual process of redrawing of borders tends to be (a few notable exceptions granted) violent.

That there are many who wish to turn political theory (and international law) into a branch of a certain flavor of ethics is familiar enough. As it happens, this past year I have conducted three job searches in political theory (including comparative), and so have seen about (by a conservative estimate) 300 job dossiers of candidates with PhDs fairly recently minted in North America and Western Europe. The vast majority of these projects buy into some version of such moral egalitarianism and a good many apply it in the manner of GPT.

What I had not truly grasped before is that within GPT deviation from such cosmopolitan egalitarianism marks one as unreasonable (in the way predicted by Carl Schmitt). Again, I had naively assumed that being reasonable would consist in something like the disposition of treating disagreement even conflict with others by way of discussion in which reasons are (sincerely) offered, analyzed, and jointly evaluated. But in GPT to be reasonable means that one cannot enter the conversation unless one accepts certain moral commitments (in professional terms, a certain "consensus"). In their introduction, Held and Maffetono do not explain where such views about the boundary of legitimacy originate and who polices the boundary of who is let into the conversation (presumably that dirty job is farmed out to anonymous referees who -- like the marines -- do their work outside the scope of publicity).

One thing one learns from Thomas Kuhn (or George Stigler) is that where we find a professional consensus absent science, there are other forces that produce uniformity. In fact, Kuhn teaches that if one wants the appearance of intellectual progress one does well to create such uniformity of background commitments. The previous paragraph suggests, then, that the avalanche of work on GPT is the collective considered wisdom of our young scholars that the primary road to professional advancement and (for the more idealistic among them) improvement of humanity requires one to work within some version of GPT.

We know from history that intellectual mono-culture are great at problem-solving (and this can generate great creativity), but otherwise not very robust. They are incapable of adapting to changing circumstances and unable to confront, truly, the most urgent questions in which one must come to terms with arguments of the deviants from orthodoxy. (For this would require it to be self-critical about its own commitments.)+ So, a moment of reckoning is due. If history were ironic, then the professional triumph of GPT is also the moment it becomes obsolete.** After all, the political and democratic resurgence of views that reject versions of GPT's normative cosmopolitanism is the striking feature of our time. So, it is tempting to preach the end of liberal cosmopolitanism and become a prophet for a new order.

But history is probably not ironic. So, while some of us, outside the professional boundaries, search for alternative political theories, GPT may well continue to thrive even if the political conditions that gave rise to it, and that allow it to shape the political order, have long passed. After all, some of the greatest philosophical scholastics lived in the twentieth century and have enriched our intellectual universe.

05/25/2017

First, a primer: the idea ‘black lives matter’ and the political movement bearing that phrase represent something expansive but specific. The idea ‘black lives matter’ is an ethical demand calling for an end to the erasure of black lives and presence by systems of racist power anchored in a history of white supremacy. The movement puts this ethical demand into action by seeking to influence city, state, and federal policies through acts of protest and civil disobedience. In our current moment, both the idea and the movement are aligned against the notion that black experiences are irrelevant or negligible for organizing our collective view of civil society.

So, if you might – please do – try to imagine my distaste when it was brought to my attention that your journal published a philosophical symposium on ‘black lives matter’ with not one philosopher of color represented, without one philosopher of color to convey her or his contextualized sense of a movement that is urgently and justifiably about context. It certainly cannot be said there was no one to ask. I should know. I just published a book on the philosophical foundations of black lives matter.

Now, it might be the case that this particular symposium is merely unfortunate –the journal asked every black philosopher and political theorist it could find and was turned down. (Disclosure: I was not asked.) From an outside point of view, someone desiring to take on this more generous stance but not wanting to do so on blind faith would have only to do something simple: revisit the journal’s publication record and if it turns out that the topic of race or at least black philosophers, no matter the subject of their work, were decently represented in the journal’s pages, then we have some grounds to extend good faith. But things don’t look very good on this front, either.

Trayvon Martin was shot by George Zimmerman in the early months of 2012 and it was his shooting and the subsequent exoneration of Zimmerman in the summer of 2012 that sparked the movement. But we all know that. Right? Yes. So we are now five years on from that event, and since what is at issue is what appears to be a problematic mishandling of a symposium on the movement for black lives we can ask whether the journal has in these five years taken the political problem of race seriously as philosophically worthy. One might (or might not) be surprised to learn that at four issues a year, making a total of nearly twenty issues (including a special issue titled “Philosophy, Politics, and Society”), the Journal of Political Philosophy has not published a single article on the philosophy of race: voting, elections, immigration, global markets, and animals have gotten their time in the journal’s sun. But as black Americans, and the philosophers who study racial inequality – a political philosophical problem – have directly engaged one of our era’s most sinister moral and political quandaries, the journal has failed to represent race in its pages. Maybe more damning, so far as I can tell, not one black philosopher has seen her or his work appear in the pages of your respected journal, on race or any other topic.

You can see, then, how at this point the generous reading of the mishandling of the symposium comes under significant pressure. So much pressure, in fact, that it becomes compressed into something else: strained hope. The hope that intelligent and imaginative people can see the landscape of morality in its complexity and be sensitive to life-worlds beyond their range of experience. And the way we do this is to diversity the voices to which we listen. You see? – diversity really is an ethically important ideal. To be clear, I welcome the participation of non-brown voices in a symposium on black lives matter. It is important that there be a range of viewpoints on a matter that is democratically urgent – we are all involved in this problem. So my issue is not in the least with those authors whose papers were appropriated for the symposium. Rather I am directly challenging the editorial staff to account for their offense against a movement and community.

....And this is especially important as what we do – when we write and publish – contributes to the historical record. What is so deflating about the journal’s misstep here is that this contribution to the historical record is in fact a kind of replaying of history that the movement for black lives has dedicated itself to eliminating from a society struggling to be decent – the erasure of black presence when and where it counts and is needed.

When we understand the production and scrutiny of argument as the characteristic practice of philosophy, we may well come to believe that the form can be separated from the person engaged in and evaluation of argument.+ That is, while it is a sociological and professional (and, thus, economic) matter who gets credit for originating or advancing an argument and its refinements (and who does the drudgery of refereeing and editing arguments), one may come to hold that it is not a properly philosophical concern to worry about who has a seat at the argumentative table except in so far as the participants are good at the argumentative stuff.+

In what follows, let's stipulate, for the sake of (ahh) argument, that being competent at the argumentative stuff is a necessary condition for participation in philosophy. While, as feminists have shown (see this piece by Lisa Shapiro), this necessary condition rules out quite a few (potentially truth-apt) practices from philosophy and may well exclude people who share certain characteristics (being a woman, being born outside of Europe, etc.), this may be a price to pay in order to talk of a practice -- philosophy -- as a particular unity.

A nice feature of this argument-centric understanding of the nature of philosophy is that it is potentially emancipatory in two important ways: First, the barriers to entry are relatively low and even powerful social boundaries (of religion, class, gender) can, thereby, be overcome. For example, it is a remarkable fact that the early analytic, Lvov-Warsaw school of logic included lots of women and Jews (when this was extremely rare). Second, it allows for a very wide ranges of concepts and topics (say, from modal arguments for the existence of God to new conceptualizations of social ontology) to become subject of philosophical inquiry. This, too, makes philosophical practice, in principle, welcoming to people from all kinds of walk of life. So, (recall) while the argumentative conception of philosophy is compatible with turning philosophy over to disembodied machines, in practice it means many different kinds of embodied thinkers can participate in the practice (until a corporation marketing deep learning program manages to put us out of business).

The weak philosophical link in this self-understanding of philosophy, is the input of the argumentative machinery: the source of our premises. Depending on the population of philosophers, there may well be biases (in the methodological sense) that prevent the full possibility space of premises to be searched, mapped, and evaluated. Starting points may be thought intuitive, when they are really biased (the trope of X-PHI), and objections may be missed because folk are unaware. (Recall my post on how reading Barnes on disability made me change my idea of what a human is.) Reflection on this weak link is one reason why epistemologists, philosophers of science, and political epistemologists/philosophers have become increasingly welcoming of epistemic diversity (for a nuanced discussion see Solomon) and sensitive to inductive risk (Heather Douglas), epistemic injustice (e.g., Miranda Fricker) and (Spivak's notion) of epistemic violence (Dotson) in knowledge production and, when reflexive, in philosophical practice. I made some such point in one of my responses to the Hypatia debacle.

These issues can be discerned in one strain of argument in Lebron's open letter:* it's the one focused on having "black experiences" present in the professional discussion. Lebron (who may not embrace a conception of philosophy as focused on arguments) calls attention to the fact that one professional conduit for having such experience be part of the collective professional evaluation of argument, "philosophy of race," is absent in one of the leading journals in political philosophy.** Of course, Lebron's ambitions are wider because he is not merely concerned with the profession, but also with the construction of the "collective view of civil society." There are, in fact, complex questions to be asked about the relationship between philosophical discussion and the collective view of civil society, but let's stipulate that philosophy can contribute to this view (this matters in what follows next).

It is a peculiar fact about the state of the profession that when these themes are applied to professional philosophy, there is a willingness to dismiss attention to social identity of existing members of the profession (and the excluded ones) either as identity politics or as facilitating entrenchment of a pernicious status quo (Brian Leiter has been posting about this). While the charge is often made by the same people (with a fondness for a kind of masculine Marxism or Nietzscheanism), it is important to see that the two charges actually pull in different directions. For, one can recognize that one may safely downplay (social) identity when society is fully just (so that epistemic lack of diversity need not reinforce existing or create new forms of moral and political harms). But to insist that one should organize the epistemic norms of the profession as if one already inhabits a just world (while one does not do so) generates a peculiar practical contradiction whereby the practice that is intended to contribute to some improvement of the world actually generates more harms (cf. my former colleague, José Bermudez @IHE). That is, part of the charge of identity politics only makes sense in contexts radically different from reality.

The folk that argue that identity politics entrenches a bad social order (by making it seem more just, by reducing friction, by increasing number of stake-holders in it, etc), accept that the world is less than ideal and also accept that professional philosophy has some role in improving it (recall this post on Nancy Fraser). And, in fact, let's stipulate for the sake of argument (what is really a complex empirical question) that they are correct that if (what they call) identity politics in professional philosophy were successful (first in philosophy and then in influencing the construction of civil society) the political (neoliberal, unfair, etc.) status quo would be further entrenched. That is, it prevents other forms of social/political revolution. (Of course, for some preventing revolution and the bloodshed that accompanies it may well be a noble goal.)

As it happens, the risk of objectification, and as I'll suggest, commodification is also intrinsic to contemporary professional philosophy. To be sure, the objectification and commodification of others in philosophical research is a complicated matter and involves lots of contextual judgment. Yet, what matters here is that the argument-centric conception of philosophy always runs the risk of some such objectification in virtue of the epistemically and socially useful fact that arguments can be decoupled (as epistemic objects) from the persons and experiences that initially gives rise to them or which they purport to represent.++

Even if one thinks that there is no problem with arguments as such (after all one may think there is a useful division of labor between, say, activists and those that argue about activism), arguments are not just a means to philosophical truth but they are also means to social status and credit, in part, through publication in journals. They then enter a complex credit economy that translates into jobs, promotion, and social recognition. The absence of such recognition and, worse, the erasure of a certain presence -- the "when and where it counts" -- is not merely an instance of commodification of other people's experience(s), but, when noted, also becomes a potent symbolic representation of the ways in which our epistemic practices can entrench a harmful social status quo.++

Let me close with a reflection, I don't think it is a surprise that analytic philosophy is confronting these issues right now (while allowing that social media amplifies their intensity and rapidity). Its methods and practices were developed and calibrated on the study of logic/mathematics/physics and extended to natural languages and meta-ethics. The methods work well in casuistry in which lots of background commitments are givens.*** (Even in so-called 'core' areas it's been an age of meta-philosophy for a while now.) The increasing, sustained interest in social ontology, political philosophy, and social amelioration are relatively recent phenomena, and how to think about the relationship between our professional practices and research ethics has not been -- outside standpoint epistemology and philosophy of race, perhaps -- a subject of central concern (as it is, say, in anthropology or medicine). Some may recoil from socially and policy relevant philosophy (under the rubric of risk-aversion to controversy and social justice warriors). Others, I hope our best lights, may develop a better understanding of and improvements in research ethics and methods.

05/04/2017

I am persuaded that this tension exists not merely because traditional speculative philosophy frequently cultivates mystification and conscious irrationalism in matters of strict philosophy, but because it has repercussions upon social theory and practice, as recent events have amply shown. Analytic philosophy has thus a double function: it provides quiet green pastures for intellectual analysis, wherein its practitioners can find refuge from a troubled world and cultivate their intellectual games with chess-like indifference to its course; and it is also a keen, shining sword helping to dispel irrational beliefs and to make evident the structure of ideas. It is at once the pastime of a recluse and a terribly serious adventure: it aims to make as clear as possible what it is we really know.--Ernest Nagel (1936) "Impressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe. I" Journal of Philosophy, 9.

In the wake of the Hypatia debacle there is a renewed interest in the role of care in scholarship (see this discussion prompted by Lisa Miracchi at Dailynous). I have seen it said that analytical philosophers are clueless about research ethics and that they treat the people they write about as objects not as interested parties or ends in their own right [fill in your favorite egregious example]. (Apologies for not citing any given person in particular.) Often such comments are accompanied by praise of critical theory. Now, it's true that there are strands of critical theory which, in conversation with some of the social sciences (especially anthropology and sociology), have developed fairly sophisticated reflexive practices and research methods that allow for the development of species of responsible speech.* (Medicine and psychology have also developed such practices.) Together with professional economists (but cf. De Martino), analytical philosophers do seem, at first glance, to stand out for a lack of interest in responsible speech. But it does not follow that analytical philosophy lacks interest in responsible speech and lacks (historical and conceptual) resources to engage in it.

Before I get to that, by responsible speech I mean to talk about the circumstances in which philosophical speech, in the well-intentioned pursuit of truth, may foresee-ably harm others and one tries to prevent such harm(s). This is especially a matter of concern when those harmed are vulnerable members of society which lack resources or access to participate on equal footing in philosophy (and policy environments influenced by philosophical speech). In recent scholarly (broadly analytical) literature such issues are not unfamiliar and they are discussed by philosophers of science in terms of inductive risk (Heather Douglas) and by epistemologists in terms of epistemic injustice (e.g., Miranda Fricker) and (Spivak's notion) of epistemic violence (Dotson). One indirect consequence of such harm, and which generates an enlightened self-interest in it, is that the institution of philosophy may, fairly or not, come into disrepute (I call this the Socratic Problem).

And, in fact, the second function of of analytic philosophy is aimed at a species of irresponsible speech that is said to be cultivated by "traditional speculative philosophy" which "frequently cultivates mystification and conscious irrationalism in matters of strict philosophy," and "has repercussions upon social theory and practice, as recent events have amply shown." (9) Now, Nagel does not explain how the mystification and irrationalism influences social theory and practice. But he takes for granted that his readers are familiar with the tenets of "romantic irrationalism that have "engulfed Europe." (5)

Such self-command is not characteristic of Nagel's image of analytic philosophy. However, Nagel is not unaware of such self command within analytical philosophy. He explicitly presents Wittgenstein's reluctance to publish, Wittgenstein's unwillingness to grant "permission to attend his lectures" (17) to outsiders (like Nagel), and the generation of an "esoteric atmosphere" in Wittgenstein's circle (17). Whatever one may think of such esotericism (not to be confused with the Straussian kind), it is also instantiates self-command. Here the Stoic refuge becomes a safe house almost inaccessible to society and with extremely indirect, if any, impact on society.**

Now, one may think that that the functions of analytical philosophy, the Stoic and the Enlightenment project, have in common the encouragement to speak the truth come what may. Surprisingly enough that's not true of either function. The Stoic project is not oriented toward truth, but toward cultivation of skill (widely understood) at the (serious!) game. This is why in the seminar room and many of our publications, analytical philosophers have enormous tolerance for false thought experiments and unrealistic examples. It's also not true of the Enlightenment function of the project. For, its aim is to help dispel irrational beliefs in order to produce better "social theory and practice." (This is an expression of Nagel's pragmatism;*** I return to this below.) Truth is a means here not the end. To be sure, it does not mean that on this picture analytical philosophers wish to promote the false as a means to good ends (we're not in the realm of Government House Utilitarianism or Platonic noble liars), but it does mean that we can evaluate the project of clarification and analysis in light of an interest in responsible speech including the harms to vulnerable others because the business of analytical philosophy is, in part, to promote better practices.

04/28/2017

In his 1956 presidential address to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, John Herman Randall Jr. worries about the growing sectarianism he identifies in American (academic) philosophy. More explicitly, he worries about the growing tendency in 1950s American philosophy to identify being a philosopher with having a certain approach to philosophy. This identification is still very much with us today. In order to be accepted as a philosopher one must by and large work with an approach to philosophy; though there is some leeway, mostly the approach is either analytic or continental. This choice is required in order to be given access to jobs, journal publications, conferences and more. Randall traces the beginnings of this kind of sectarianism, let us call it the beginnings of the development of guild philosophies, in American philosophy to the 1940s. He writes:

Then came the Logical Positivists, introducing a new note into what was rapidly becoming a scene of fruitful cooperation. They brought to this country the narrow sectarianism of the warring German schools. They were no longer fighting philosophical "error"; they merely dismissed it as "meaningless." Like the Epicurean school, they listed only their own writings in their bibliographies: "scientific philosophy" first arose with them. Next arrived what was at first called "Cambridge analysis"; because of the curricular set-up at Cambridge, this movement was at least interested in mathematics and mathematical logic. These logicians were soon swamped, however, in numbers and influence, by "Oxford analysis." With far greater suavity than the Viennese, the Oxford dons did not brush off what failed to interest them as "meaningless." It was just not "doing philosophy," that was all. And the next step, of course, was to insist not only that an interest in science or in history is not "philosophical," though only slightly discreditable: it was to claim such interests to be actually harmful to the philosopher, destroying the purity of his method. To "do" philosophy adequately you must definitely not "do" anything else (Talking and Looking, pp. 7-8).

Randall’s worry is striking. After all, we have lived through decades without much worry about the existence of guild philosophies. Yes, there have been worries about the analytic-continental divide, but these have not been widely shared by the mainstream, that is by analytic philosophers. More importantly, worries about the analytic-continental divide have not usually been about guild philosophy as such; most often, they have been worries about the distribution of power between guilds. Randall is, moreover, correct to worry about guild philosophy and his (admittedly somewhat exaggerated) description neatly juxtaposes guild philosophy and what may be some of its worrying effects, namely philosophical fashions and philosophers with too much confidence in their approaches to philosophy.

In a philosophical guild with a philosophy, guild and guild members are not well placed to evaluate philosophical approaches. The point here is partly that guild members are educated to favour their prospective guild’s approach and thus are less likely to be competent to fairly assess its relative merits, but also that the individual and collective material interests of guild members will counter attempts at fair evaluation. Worse, changing philosophical fashions – and Randall goes on to note a further wave from England, namely the wave of usage elucidators – may well partly be a side effect of having a guild philosophy. For when one’s guild has a philosophy, changing guild philosophy will be as easy as changing guild leadership, and changing guild leadership in a small guild controlled by the chosen ones is relatively easy. To be sure, Kuhn argued that paradigm acceptance is required for progress. I do not agree; one can, as is illustrated by the post-Einsteinian development of Newtonian physics[1], even work with a paradigm long after it is known to be off target. In any case, the quick changes of fashion Randall draws our attention to hardly look like the long-term commitment to puzzle solving which Kuhn promoted.

Of course, the gyrations Randall describes may have been perfectly reasonable, even if they took place in a context in which guild philosophy was strong. And even if Kuhn was wrong about the merits of paradigm acceptance, or his considerations in favour of paradigm acceptance do not apply to twentieth-century philosophy, having a guild philosophy is likely to have been useful for philosophy guilds. Randall recognises that the increasing sectarianism in America changed who was being discussed and cited; at most, one needed only to discuss the sufficiently important members of one’s guild. Since the job of the academic guild is to certify experts about some subject matter, it naturally involves differential treatment of those within and without the guild. This practice has at least two potential benefits for a guild. It might substantially ease the production of research that is taken to be novel since what counts as novel is what has not been proposed within the guild. In this way, for example, within the guild that was mid-twentieth-century analytic philosophy, it was possible to restart debates about, e.g., Kant, justice, knowledge while ignoring the bulk of what had already been said on these topics. Even metaphysics could be revived at a time when it was alive and well. Permission to ignore non-guild members’ work has the further advantage that it allows lowering the requirements for guild membership. Getting to grips with what guild members are saying is easier than getting to grips with the tradition beyond the guild, especially if we are considering a newly established guild such as that of analytic philosophy in the 1950s.

Randall does worry that American philosophy is increasingly disengaged from society and other academic disciplines. The future of teaching in American colleges, he claims, depends on being able to convince, among others, scientific colleagues and university deans that philosophers have a role in examining the foundations and methods of the sciences. For, without being able to do this, there is a risk that philosophers will be found redundant in academia. Randall seems to have been wrong about the prospects of the future of American academic philosophy, at least if he was thinking about its future in the immediate decades after his paper. The withdrawal he detected coincided with very substantial growth in the profession in America. Still, perhaps Randall is close to having his finger on another advantage that guild philosophy had for mid-twentieth-century analytic philosophy. For being allowed to work independently of other academic disciplines and of society’s concerns reduces the demands on guild certification even further than limiting one’s discussants to guild members only.

In sum, the identification of guild and philosophy may have distinct pragmatic advantages for a philosophy guild, including minimising the demands of guild philosophy and giving novices space to develop, even if these advantages may threaten to come at the cost of being able rationally to deal with choice between philosophical approaches.